Experiment 1: How I cured myself of perfectionism.steemCreated with Sketch.

in #songs7 years ago (edited)

Many artists and creators struggle with perfectionism and until recently I was cursed with the desire to get everything just right. Cursed because, taken too far perfectionism means- you never finish anything, you never release! I decided the time had come to get over myself. (2 minute read.)

I had two major objectives for myself:

  1. to get comfortable sharing things that I knew weren't finished or perfect.
  2. to dramatically reduce the time between initial creation and first performance/showing.

My motive for 1) I've already mentioned. My motive for 2) was to encourage myself into a state of flow. The faster I get feedback on what I'm doing the faster I know what's working and which direction to go next.

I decided to do an experiment. Here are the design parameters.

  1. I would focus on my songs. Why? Because my songs are the things that I am most scared about sharing. I care about them, they are precious to me and they speak fundamentally to the most personal parts of my life. If I could share my songs without them having to be perfect I would definitely be able to share other things.
  2. I would record one take of me playing guitar and singing straight to camera. If I made a mistake, fumbled a word or a chord, tough luck. It was going up as it was.
  3. I would aim for an edit/encode/upload time of less than one hour.
  4. I would share the recording the same day on social media.

I chose to share them first on Facecrack because I already had a large number of followers, I could get rapid feedback in the direct form of "likes" and - well again- Facecrack kind of terrifies me :-)

So over the course of about a month I shared 11 songs, which I shall now share with you here! I'll finish up by sharing what I learned.

Do you struggle with perfectionism? How does it effect you? Have you successfully managed to overcome it? Let me know in the comments!

Yours

@kindle Copyright and Disclaimer.

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What a great experiment! YES! I love it.
I do struggle with perfectionism, I can not overcome it, I simply just don't do anything. Just makes me paralized. Even though there's no real "stake" (I wanted to write steak, hahah) it's still extremely difficult to show writings to friends or strangers. This site might be a big experiment for me as well. Just it's a difficult place to be a beginner. To s.ck at something. But that's the only way to be better. And also - noone can do it perfectly the first time, it's an absurd thought and wish. (no real vote power here, maybe -@originalworks)

Thanks for the tip. Well the key learning for me was, and I guess it's not a huge insight, just do it! I realised that no one was going to care as much about it as I did, but maybe someone would at least get a smile out of listening :-)

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